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Europeanising spaces in Paris, ca. 1947-1962

McDonnell, H.M.

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59

Chapter 2. The Parisian Home as a Europeanising Space

By May 1945 there were perhaps forty million uprooted people in Europe.1 As the immediacy of

the Second World War receded, the anxieties in Europe about home, both in the sense of a

tangible abode and of belonging and security, did not. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Jacques

Soustelle suggested that the recent experience of cities in flames was a key locus of the

distinctive psychology of the French and European peoples.2 One might surmise that, in large

part, this lay behind what Leif Jerram describes as a ‘“cult” of home in post-war Europe.’3 A key

point of European commonality after the war was an insufficient housing stock, and across the

continent housing was a desperate popular aspiration and priority of government.4 Tony Judt

notes that in post-war opinion polls, ‘housing’ always topped the list of popular concerns.5

The home, then, concerned Europeans both in the sense of material shelter and affective

belonging and security. Preoccupation about procuring lodgings was compounded by the task

identified by Marshal Berman – and surely exacerbated in a time of continental cataclysm – of

making oneself at home in the modern city.6 But how did Paris fit into this shared post-war

European experience? And in what ways was discourse about Europe connected to the Parisian

1 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: Abacus, 1995), 51.

2 Jacques Soustelle, ‘France and Europe: a Gaullist View’, Foreign Affairs 30:1/4 (1951/1952), 545. Soustelle was a

French anthropologist specialisng in pre-Columbian civilizations, and Governor-General of Algeria from 1955 to

1956. He was a key ally of de Gaulle at the time of the 1958 Algiers revolt but later became a resolute opponent of

de Gaulle’s Algerian policy. See Stephen Tyre, ‘From Algérie Française to France Musulmane: Jacques Soustelle

and the Myths and Realities of ‘Integration’, 1955-1962’, French History 20/3, 276-296. 3 Leif Jerram, Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2011), 228. 4 For statistics outlining the extent of the European housing shortage after the Second World War see Tony Judt,

Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Vintage, 2010), 82. 5 Ibid., 282.

6 See Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1982).

60

home in a stronger sense than merely being a priority shared by Europeans in general? This

examination of the Paris home reveals that in various ways a strong equivalence was drawn

between Europeanisation and modernisation. This chapter connects the home in the French

capital to the discourse about a renewed Europe after the Second World War and through the

period of decolonisation, and to the reconfigured understandings of Europe and Europeanness

these prompted. In particular, it picks up on Étienne Balibar’s observation that ‘the question of

giving an endogenous, self-referring definition of “Europeans” has only come up very recently.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, the principal meaning of this name referred to groups

of colonizers in each of the colonized regions elsewhere in the world.’7 This chapter will place

particular emphasis on the immigration of both European Algerians and Algerian Muslims, as

they were termed, to examine the Parisian home. For the home is a particularly useful space to

examine the dynamics of the turning point in understandings of Europe and Europeanness, to

which Balibar alludes.

First, urban planning is identified as a post-war operation that was applied to Paris with

an underlying vision of the city’s place in the new Europe. The reconfiguration of the French

capital in turn had implications for the city as a home, and this could be seen to be rationalised in

part by notions of the Europeanness of Parisians. Second, Europe and Europeanness are

identified as tropes in the reception and housing of Algerian immigrants – that is to say, both

European Algerians, and Algerian Muslims.8 Further, Europeanness is investigated as a guiding

7 Étienne Balibar, ‘Es Gibt Keinen Staat in Europa: Racism and Politics in Europe Today’, New Left Review I/186

(March-April, 1991), 7n. Emphasis in the original. 8 An obvious omission here is the settlement of Algerian and North African Jews in France. In large part this is

because, in comparison with the reception of Algerian Muslims and pieds noirs, notions of Europeanness do not

appear to have been widely invoked. This of course also contrasts with discourse about earlier waves of Jewish

migration to Paris. This may be connected to the argument that the integration of North African Jews in France in

this period was comparatively unproblematic. See Michel Abitbol & Alan Astro, ‘The Integration of North African

Jews in France’, Yale French Studies 85 (1994), 248-261.

61

term in housing policy as applied to these immigrant groups, to the point where one can talk

about state ethnicisation of supposed Europeans and non-Europeans. Finally, the shantytowns, or

bidonvilles, that housed many of the Algerian immigrants are examined in terms of how

discourses of Europe connected to physical urban space.

One claim of this chapter is that discourse about the Parisian home commonly invoked

two registers of Europeanness. In this sense, the chapter extends to the French metropole Julia

Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda’s argument that in European colonial history there was no

single fund of rhetorical devices to characterise relations of power between Europeans and their

Others. In the case of French Algeria, for instance, several discourses flourished simultaneously.

Discourse proliferated that accommodated the ideological underpinnings of the mission

civilisatrice, but it coexisted with popular pied noir vocabulary which often emphasised instead

an irreconcilable opposition between Islam and the West.9 Similarly, one of the registers of

Europeanness used in relation to the Parisian home consisted in a binary opposition of European

and non-European. The second register can be likened to Timothy Garton Ash’s observation that

in the East, Europe just fades away.10

Likewise, one trope implicitly held Europeanness to be a

graded scale that faded away without any clear point of demarcation where one might

conclusively delineate the European and the non-European. What is more, it is not only the case

that discourse about the Paris home shifted back and forth between these registers. They were

also sometimes invoked simultaneously and contradictorily. This was symptomatic of an acute

tension between Europeanness and universalism, inclusion and exclusion, which ran through

9 Julia Clancy-Smith & Frances Gouda (eds.), Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French

and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 9. 10

Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (New York: Random House, 1993),

391.

62

housing policy, as well as other aspects of the welfare state of the French Republic.

The Paris Home and the Legacy of War in Europe

The place of Paris was ambiguous within the common European experience of a post-war

yearning for security embodied in the home. The city, and thus Parisians’ homes, had not been

bombed to anywhere near the extent of other European cities, though notoriously Hitler had

given orders to flatten it, which were disregarded. Yet this survival came at the price of a shoddy

compromise. So, one might equally surmise that beneath this attitude lay some sense of

survivors’ guilt, and a concrete reminder of its complicity with a certain Europe of Germanism,

to use Sartre’s phrase.11

Despite pageantry such as de Gaulle’s famous address from the Hôtel de

Ville after the Liberation that laid the foundations of the myth of resistant France, that Europe of

Germanism would linger in various ways.

Leora Auslander demonstrates how this was the case for Jewish Parisian returnees who

were given a limited opportunity to claim restitution of the dispossession of their homes and

belongings. Auslander finds that in their claims forms, applicants were instructed only to list

their material possessions for which they were making a claim. However, the procedure was

often used as an opportunity to refuse retrospectively the denial of their right in that Europe to a

political, social, and material home in Paris and France.12

11

Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Routledge, 2003), 220. 12

Leora Auslander, ‘Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris’, Journal of Contemporary History 40/2 (April, 2005),

237-259. On the importance of the idea of Europe in Vichy and occupied France see Julian Jackson, France: the

Dark Years, 1940-1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), passim. Andrew Hussey also notes that Paris was

the centre for collaborationist intellectuals, who ‘saw themselves as launching a moral crusade that would lead

63

In the following years the continued neglect of housing in Paris brought it more into line

with those European cities that had been destroyed in the war. Wakeman details the extent of the

impoverishment of the French capital in this regard. And she notes that slums, dirt, and grimness

characterised the city in those years more than the stereotypical image of the ‘City of Light’,

reflected in the famous contemporary photographic work of Robert Doisneau or Henri Cartier-

Bresson. She remarks that from end to end, Paris seemed to be a ‘strange hallucination of

postwar Europe in crisis, nothing but urban debris.’13

According to Andrew Hussey, in the early

1950s, almost ninety percent of homes in Paris lacked basic amenities. Slums and soup kitchens

proliferated alike, while dingy, cheap hotels or hostels passed as a home for a significant

proportion of the city’s population.14

Although Paris had survived the war largely intact, it was

impacted by the greater destruction of other parts of France and the attendant flood of refugees

into the cities who populated such hotels and makeshift shelter, and of course accentuated the

problem of over-crowding.15

Urban Planning and Europeanising Spaces in Paris

Urban planning of course was a general European priority necessitated by the legacy of

war. In Paris it is notable that some discourse about urban planning and the renovation of homes

white, heterosexual Europeans towards the new world order as dreamt up by the Nazi High Command. Andrew

Hussey, Paris: The Secret History (London: Viking, 2006), 370. 13

Rosemary Wakeman, The Heroic City: Paris, 1945-1958 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 45-46. 14

Hussey, Paris, 399. Laure Pitti cites the sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe’s contemporary figures that

around 400,000 Parisians lived in furnished hotel accommodation, including 65,000 foreigners and 80,000 North

Africans. See Laure Pitti, ‘Ces Parisiens venus d’ailleurs. Ouvriers algériens dans la Seine durant les années 1950’,

Histoire et sociétés 20/4 (2006), 118. 15

Mehdi Lallaoui, Du bidonville aux HLM (Paris: Syros, 1993), 13.

64

in the city had a European dimension. There was certainly a strong European flavour to the 1947

Exposition internationale de l’urbanisme et de l’habitation in which, as Wakeman describes it:

‘nine European countries displayed the revolutionary urban-planning techniques that would

rebuild a shattered world.’16

In both senses, the universal assumptions of Europe were on show.

Interestingly, though, the previous year the Grand Palais hosted the Exposition des techniques

américaines de l’habitation et de l’urbanisme. Here Parisian attendees were introduced to ‘the

American way of living.’17

The Ministère de la reconstruction et de l’urbanisme (MRU) also

built fully equipped American houses in the Paris suburbs in an unwitting admission of the

difficulty of demarcating the image of Europe from that of the United States. Indeed, this was an

uncomfortably complicated task given the mutual dependency of their post-war fortunes. This

exhibition can be contextualised by Victoria de Grazia’s thesis about the Americanisation of

Europe. She locates the origins of US hegemony as a market empire precisely in Europe, which

functioned as a core space of post-war American cultural and commercial expansion and as an

American laboratory for the implantation of modern consumer practices.18

Europe was thus not

only constituted by, but also constitutive of, an America that often fascinated but was equally

often scorned by its peoples, particularly in France. One might surmise that it was precisely this

intertwining of post-war America and Europe that underscored the depiction of a radically Other

America, and that the frequently incensed tone of this representation was fuelled precisely by

their similarities and interconnections.19

16

Wakeman, The Heroic City, 290. 17

Ibid., 289-290. 18

See Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge,

Mass.: Belknap Press, 2005). 19

For notable contemporary discussions of the relation between Europe and America see André Malraux’s speech

‘Man and Artistic Culture’ at the opening session of UNESCO at the Sorbonne in 1946 in Reflections on Our Age:

Lectures at The Opening Session of UNESCO at the Sorbonne (London: Allen Wingate, 1948), 84-99; and his 1956

postface to The Conquerors, trans. Stephen Becker (London: Journeyman, 1983), 179-198.

65

There was also a European dimension to the Parisian home in relation to the United

States via the commitments of Cold War partisanship. The shoddiness of Parisian homes was

often explained as a by-product of the priority of European strategic commitment to the East-

West conflict. The housing crisis was sometimes blamed on the Cold War generally, and the

Americans in particular. This geopolitical situation was seen as siphoning off funds which

otherwise could have been invested in housing. In February 1963, for instance, responding to

complaints about the conditions of the bidonvilles in his municipality, the deputy mayor of the

French Communist Party (PCF)-controlled suburb of Nanterre contrasted the lack of availability

of funds for housing, and the ease with which money could be found for projects like the atomic

bomb.20

The common PCF complaint about the depletion of social funds by the prioritisation of

Western militarism was often put the other way around, of course. The Seine prefecture insisted

in 1952, for instance, that the housing crisis could be tackled but for the financial burden of

counteracting international Communism.21

Europe was also a watchword in urban planning in regard to the renovation of Parisian

housing in this period, as well as the city’s maintenance and regeneration more broadly. In 1946

the Seine prefect, Marcel Flouret, enjoined urban planners to offer a vision of the future and to

‘prepare our Capital for the role it will play in Europe and the world of tomorrow.’ Moreover, he

warned that, ‘if we are not careful, in twenty or thirty years, London, Berlin and the other

European capitals, which experienced such destruction during the war, will be rebuilt, while

20

Institut de l’histoire du temps présent. Fonds Monique Hervo (Hereafter FMH). ARC 3019 -2. 2. Dossier général

thématique. Letter from the deputy mayor of Nanterre to Hervo, February 15, 1963. For similar complaints at Paris

municipal level see Melissa Byrnes, French like Us? Municipal Policies and North African Migrants in the Parisian

Banlieues, 1945-1975 (PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, 2008), 91, 163. We should note that the French

atomic bomb was not merely a European question in the sense of its connection to Europe’s place in the Cold War,

but was also connected to the idea of French ‘grandeur’. 21

Wakeman, The Heroic City, 137.

66

Paris, which by some miracle escaped the storm nearly intact, will become the most backward of

capital cities.’22

Parisian urban planning retained this European perspective in the 1950s. In his article ‘At

the Hour of Europe’ in the Revue urbanisme in 1957, the Commissaire à la construction et à

l’urbanisme de la région parisienne, Pierre Sudreau, reiterated the necessity of demolishing the

slum conditions that were still rife in Paris. He connected this task – or ‘the conquest of Paris’ as

he termed it – with French entry into the European Common Market. He measured the French

capital’s progress not on its own terms or as an end in itself, but in comparison with the

resurrection of Berlin and West Germany. As such, the task of urban renewal in Paris assumed a

European imperative: ‘it is no longer a matter of being the capital of a country, but that of a

continent.’23

However, urban planning encompassed more than just housing, and so the status of the

home in the city could just as easily be sidelined as promoted in this Europeanist vision for the

French capital. Wakeman describes how state urban planning from the early 1950s was intent on

promoting commercial and business services that ‘would make Paris a capital of Europe.’ This

went hand in hand with dispersing the city’s masses, along with their trade and industry. The

preservation of these quartiers populaires was often subordinated to the regulation and

‘rationalisation’ of space, and their inhabitants were increasingly separated from the city centre

and their places of work. By 1956 the centre of Paris was zoned for the three functions of

administration, commerce and banking, and intellectual life. These were the prestigious

cosmopolitan activities that were to secure Paris’s position among the modern European

22

Ibid., 302. 23

Cited in ibid., 320.

67

capitals.24

This sanitisation of Paris was also connected to the importance of the city as a tourist

destination. This occurred in the broader context of the emergence of a Europe of tourism, which

was assuming such importance that by 1964 Raymond Aron remarked that, ‘For the tourist,

Europe is a unit. Never in the past has such a number of Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians,

Dutchmen and Englishmen found it so natural to cross their own frontiers and travel abroad.’25

Even as early as the summer of 1949, Janet Flanner remarked on the spectacular boom in

European travel, noting that the Paris tourist season in turn was the best in the entire continent.26

Furthermore, she implied that this phenomenon was not merely a reflection of rising prosperity,

but also said something about the recent experience, and so the self-understanding, of Europeans:

This summer’s mass travel in Western Europe was probably a logical enough result of its recent

history. For six years, almost nobody travelled except soldiers and those segments of the

population that made an exodus in fright or in fatal, forced emigrations. Some people travelled

then because they were ordered to, while others, shut in, yearned in vain to move about. And

there were not enough trains, food, or, most important, money, all of which now seem to abound.

It is difficult to believe that Europe could change so miraculously and become the great,

pleasurable, money-making and money-spending touring ground that it has been this season,

exactly one decade after the war season of 1939.27

These various ways in which the city was reconfigured in accordance with ideas about

the affiliation of Paris and Europe nevertheless also had implications for the city as a home. As

the cultural supplement of the Spanish exile journal Solidaridad obrera insisted, there was more

than one Paris. The Paris of tourism was not that of the Parisian worker.28

To borrow Henri

Lefebvre’s formulation, one might say that the Europeanisation of Paris correlated to an

24

Ibid., 316. 25

Raymond Aron, ‘Old Nations, New Europe’, Daedalus 93/ 1 (Winter, 1964), 52. 26

Janet Flanner, Paris Journal 1944-1965 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1966), 105. 27

Ibid., 106. 28

Michel Ragón, ‘El París que trabaja’, Solidaridad Obrera. Suplemento Literario (March, 1954).

68

abrogation of ‘the right to the city’.29

As Wakeman describes it, the dispersal of the city’s

working class from the city centre was underscored by its stereotype as ‘alien and dispensable, or

at least the conviction that it suffered from backward qualities to be rooted out by technocratic

elites.’30

Such sectors of Paris society were admittedly European, but somehow not European

enough to be suitable to reside in this new post-war European capital. Just as Garton Ash’s

Europe fades away in the East, so here it was more exactly the centre of Paris that was conceived

as the European capital, whilst the Europeanness of the city faded as one approached the city’s

margins – above all, the working class suburbs.

This quasi-colonial management of the population of the French capital parallels Paul

Rabinow’s influential thesis about the interconnection of government in the colonies and forms

of space, power, and knowledge in the French metropole.31

It is important to connect this kind of

policy to a further important driving force behind the urban reconfiguration of Paris that

encapsulated consumerism and modernisation – the curtailment of radical politics. It is notable

that urban planning in Paris was often carried out with the express aim of breaking up traditional

strongholds of the PCF in ‘Red Paris’.

Furthermore, this coercive housing policy was in a sense a continuation of a tradition of

representation that conflated the European popular classes and non-Europeans32

, though

ultimately distinctions between the two were usually allowed. Similarly, Matthew Connelly

suggests that it is probable that Louis Chevalier’s seminal 1958 work, Classes laborieuses et

classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle, was influenced by his

29

See Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la ville (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1968). For a critical introduction to Lefebvre

see Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2006). 30

Wakeman, The Historic City, 317. 31

Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,

1989). 32

Emmanuel Blanchard, La police parisienne et les Algériens (1944-1962) (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2011), 14.

69

work on North African demography,33

as part of which he warned in 1947 of ‘a real invasion and

berberisation in whole neighborhoods in Marseilles and Paris.’34

The rhetorical use of terms of

Europeanness and non-Europeanness to refer to those who lived in Paris had to give way to a

more serious questioning of these terms in the post-war period, however. The end of empire, in

particular the end of empire in Algeria which was nominally an integral part of metropolitan

France, raised problems precisely in terms of those categories. We now turn to examine their

implications for Paris as a civic home and as a space in which to secure a material home.

The Paris Home, Europe, and the Europeans of Algeria

French Algeria differed from other colonies by the extent of its settlement by a European

population. Indeed, settlers originated not only from France but also Malta, Alsace, Spain, and

Italy. Of course, the French-Algerian war called their place in North Africa into question.

However, as Todd Shepard shows, until very late in the war, very few in France expected the

European settlers to leave Algeria to resettle in France. Rather, it was assumed that they would

remain in an independent Algeria, and domicile in France was guaranteed to them only for the

purpose of reassuring them that they did not have to leave. This was a serious miscalculation, as

indeed the European community quickly began to depart. Shepard dates the start of the exodus to

the April 1962 arrest of Raoul Salan, former general and leader of the OAS. This influx was

barely acknowledged officially before the summer of that year, however. As such, the problem

33

Matthew Connelly, ‘Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict during the Algerian War for

Independence’, American Historical Review 105/3 (June 2000), 743n. 34

Ibid., 743. Sartre also notably compares the devaluation of the European working class and colonial peoples in his

introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. See Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘The Wretched of the Earth,’ in

Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, & Terry McWilliams (London & New

York: Routledge, 2006), 160.

70

demanded speedy solutions. These, as it happened, were underscored by a premise of

Europeanisation in two senses.

First, as Shepard puts it, the French state, ‘when confronted with the unexpected

“exodus” of upwards of one million French citizens fleeing Algeria, embraced familial and

ethnic descriptions to explain why some French citizens (“Europeans”) could be repatriated

home to continental France, while others (“of Muslim origin”) should stay put in Algeria.’35

This

meant that the French Republic discarded its post-1889 commitment to legal definitions of

citizenship that ignored ‘ethnicity’ or ‘race’ and embraced a definition of national belonging

limited to ‘Europeans.’36

This alteration of the codes of membership in the French nation

effectively reconfigured the Mediterranean as a boundary separating Europe and North Africa,

rather than, as the common saying had it, dividing France just as the Seine divided Paris.37

Part

of the rationale for doing so was that the alternative was fully to integrate Algerians as equal

French citizens, which would in turn entail crippling welfare provision and adjustment of living

standards.38

Accordingly, when pressed at a certain point the French Republic, that saw itself as

universal and in this sense exceptional within Europe, would defer back to the notion of

Europeanness as a get-out clause to withhold rights and status it was not prepared to grant

universally.

The most obvious losers of this policy were the Algerian harkis – Muslim Algerians who

served as Auxilaries in the French army during the war – who likewise fled to France, largely in

35

Todd Shepard, ‘Making French and European Coincide: Decolonization and the Politics of Comparative and

Transnational Histories’, Ab Imperio 2 (2007), 343. 36

Ibid., 346. 37

Ibid., 357. 38

The argument about the prohibitive expense of empire was made famously by Raymond Cartier. Up until his

interventions in Paris Match in August and September 1956 he was known as a stern defender of empire in the

name of the defence of the West. Similarly, Raymond Aron turned against maintaining French Algeria on the

grounds that it was unsustainably expensive. See Aron’s La Tragédie algérienne (Paris: Plon, 1957) and L’Algérie et

la République (Paris: Plon, 1958).

71

fear of reprisals for their role in assisting the French administration and military in Algeria to

oppose independence. Arriving in their tens of thousands in France at the same time as the pieds

noirs, their reception was starkly different. When they were allowed to stay they were denied

their legal rights as French citizens, treated as foreign ‘refugees,’ and eventually asked to re-

apply for the French citizenship that they had been born with.39

They were far more likely to

languish for years in camps than to make a home in Paris or anywhere else.

The second sense in which Europeanisation was seen to be needed was ironically in

regard to these ‘Europeans’ themselves. After all, de Gaulle himself considered the pieds noirs

barely more French than Algerian Muslims.40

Likewise, general French metropolitan disdain for

the pieds noirs was acute, particularly from the later years of the Algerian conflict, and the

condemnation and disavowal of the European Algerians drew freely on Orientalist stereotypes of

sexual deviance, misogyny, savageness, irrational chauvinism, and criminality. Indeed,

comparable stereotyping of Muslim Algerians and the pieds noirs held them both responsible for

crime in the Paris area.41

Moreover, it is particularly interesting that Nora’s own intervention in

his 1961 work Les Français d’Algérie, questioned the pieds noirs’ collective label as

‘Europeans,’ allowing at best that theirs was a diminished Europeanness that was ever fading

away. They had cut themselves away from their ‘European anchorage’ and largely lost their

‘Western essence.’42

‘“European,” he argued should connote a ‘technological civilization,

energetic and Nordic;’ the reality of what the term referred to in Algeria was ‘some Andalusian

or Calabresian worker closer to an Egyptian fellah than the worker of 1848 or the Alsatian. The

39

Shepard, ‘Making French and European Coincide,’ 356-357. 40

Ibid., 349. 41

Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 2006), 219. As Shepard explains: ‘The attention to law enforcement met as well as inspired public

concerns: during the summer of 1962 much of the popular press identified the repatriates as the source of a wave of

banditry in the south and around Paris.’ Algerian Muslim immigrants were also seen as sources of criminality. See

Pierre-Bernard Laffont, ‘La criminalité nord-africaine dans la région parisienne’, Esprit (September, 1953). 42

Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 198.

72

term “European,” he lamented, ‘groups together in a community and ennobles’ this mishmash of

degraded humanity. As such, he rejected its use.43

Nora here seems to invoke at once both of the

registers of Europeanness we identified at the start of this chapter. Having suggested that the

pieds noirs’ European quality was of a real but degenerative kind, Nora then reverted to

discarding their label as Europeans in an implied preference for the schema of binary opposition

between the qualities of Europeanness and non-Europeanness.

The image of the pieds noirs on the right was not necessarily more favourable.44

The

chief of the Paris police Maurice Papon wrote to the Minister of the Interior to express his

concerns about the security of the state, and as such lobbied to prevent the housing of repatriated

European Algerians in Paris. For a man who largely subscribed to a Manichean vision of a

besieged Europe resisting the non-European world, he seemed here to recover a sense of the

degrees of Europeanness in the sense of standards of comportment.45

While it was considered

impossible to make such a prohibition, it was still considered desirable to prevent any large

conglomeration of the pieds noirs in the city, given that they were considered to be particularly

prone to rioting.46

Perhaps one was particularly sensitive to this problem in a Paris whose

43

Ibid., 197. 44

Some like the far right student group examined in chapter five, the Fédération des étudiants nationalistes,

considered the returning pieds noirs to have been sacrificed and made a scapegoat for the convenience of a

scandalous abdication of Europe, or at least Europe in any meaningful sense. Accordingly, its members were

encouraged to meet and greet them at Paris airports in a gesture of solidarity in the context of its broader ongoing

mission to restore European supremacy. See Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques. Centre d’histoire de

l’Europe du vingtième siècle. Fonds ‘Étudiants Nationalistes’ (Hereafter abbreviated to F. EN), 1, dossier 2, FEN

presse (25 June, 1962), 3. 45

Papon’s ideas about Europe will be examined in greater depth in chapter three. 46

Yann Scioldo-Zürcher, ‘“Paris les a pris dans ses bras !” La politique d’accueil des Français d’Algérie dans le

département de la Seine’, in La France en guerre 1954-1962: expériences métropolitaines de la guerre

d’indépendance algérienne, eds. Raphaëlle Branche & Sylvie Thénault (Paris: Autrement, 2008), 454.

73

Hausmannian boulevards were constructed with the logistics of managing disturbances by the

city’s dubiously European dangerous classes in mind.47

It is in the light of these kinds of views about the degenerate Europeanness of the French

settlers that, once the exodus was acknowledged and accepted, French policy stressed forcefully

that these Europeans of Algeria were indeed part of the same family as metropolitan French

people. It followed that it was appropriate that they settle in France – a view that came to be

supported by significant sections of the press.48

It is interesting that this drive to promote the

European credentials of these ‘Europeans’ focused so heavily on the discourse of family and

sexuality. It was stressed that those arriving were reassuringly heterosexual and family-oriented.

This contradicted earlier widely publicised media portrayals of ‘European’ Algeria as a male

homosocial society whose perversion bred male violence, of which the OAS was symptomatic.49

On balance, between the discourses of their Europeanisation and de-Europeanisation, the pieds

noirs were still an object of suspicion, but they certainly enjoyed an advantage in the social

hierarchy of immigration, in that they were prioritised in housing over Muslim Algerians.50

These ‘repatriates’ could also initially invoke their Algerian status to take HLM slots reserved

for Algerians while their European origins saved them the intervening stay in the transit camps.51

Similarly, special provisions were undertaken to insure that these displaced European Algerians

47

Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (London: Abacus, 2007), 296. One should note that this commonly held view of

one of the main purposes of the design of Hausmannian Paris is disputed in Bernard Marchand, Paris, histoire d’une

ville (XIXe – XXe siècle) (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 116-117. 48

Shepard, ‘Making French and European Coincide’, 352. 49

Ibid., 353, 354. 50

Amelia H. Lyons, ‘Social Welfare, French Muslims and decolonization in France: the case of the Fonds d’action

sociale’, Patterns of Prejudice 43/ 1 (2009), 78, 84. 51

Byrnes, French like Us?, 182. Byrnes explains that initially the pieds noirs could claim both Algerian and French

status although they soon had to choose.

74

did not end up in the Paris bidonvilles, as subsistence money and lodgings were provided to this

end.52

The crucial point, though, is that the Europeanness of the pieds noirs was certainly not

taken as self-evident and by implication undermined any claims to a clear and timeless lineage of

a European people. Shepard demonstrates the pervasiveness of a certain narrative of the French

nation to rationalise Algeria’s decolonisation – namely, ‘a France within Europe and made up of

people of “European” origins.’53

But if one’s Europeanness could diminish because one had

lived in North Africa, why should those immigrants of non-European background in Paris be

considered definitively non-European? More broadly, this contradiction implied the contingency

and mutability of the term ‘European’, potentially undermining its power for any strong

invocation of identity. The emerging EEC was another institution that was often buttressed by

claims of a historically constant European people, and so it is instructive that Shepard suggests

that these reformulations of membership and belonging at the time of decolonisation could help

us rethink the history of the ascendency of the contemporary development of European political

institutions.54

The Parisian Home, Algerian Muslims, and Europeanisation

In his 1954 account of Paris life, the novelist and journalist Henri Calet recollected his

experience with a homeless Algerian immigrant, Ahmed. He reported that ‘“Presque tous les

hôteliers refusent de loger les Musulmans,” m’avait dit Ahmed, “même s’ils sont bien

52

Scioldo-Zürcher, ‘“Paris les a pris dans ses bras”’, 456. 53

Shepard, ‘Making French and European Coincide’, 357. 54

Ibid.

75

habillés.”’55

Such incidents were no doubt common. Besides hotels, which were of course a

common form of long-term accommodation, Algerians confronted prejudices when trying to

acquire housing generally. However, too strong a focus on such interpersonal instances of racism

can perhaps overshadow the French authorities’ much more robust, systemic discourse of

Europeanness and non-Europeanness which made it problematic for Algerian Muslims to make a

home in Paris.

This was certainly true in the course of the Algerian war in the French state’s battle

against the Algerian FLN in the metropole. Amelia Lyons demonstrates how housing policy was

a fundamental part of the French government’s waging of the war in the French capital.56

It was

based on the idea that terrible living conditions in slums and shantytowns were a breeding

ground for the FLN.57

Besides tackling the ongoing housing crisis in Paris, part of the impetus to

build HLMs was to take Algerian migrants out of these conditions so as to remove them from the

influence of Algerian nationalism and instil in them the belief that they had a stake in the

universalist French Republic. The latter was a project that continued beyond the end of the war

in 1962. A 1956 report of Cahiers Nord-Africains emphasised that this battle for hearts and

minds included inculcating in Algerian Parisians an appropriate conception of Europe. Isolated

single men in the bidonvilles were supposed to be particularly susceptible to various kinds of

immoral behaviour, subversive propaganda, and ‘hostilité irraisonnée envers la civilisation

européenne’.58

55

Henri Calet, Les deux bouts (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 137. 56

Lyons, ‘Social Welfare, French Muslims and decolonization in France’, 76. 57

Ibid., 73-74. 58

Unnamed author, ‘Les familles nord-africaines en France’, Cahiers nord-africains 35-36 (September-October,

1956), 8-9.

76

This policy of targeting living conditions was, however, self-thwarting because of the

categorisation of many of the Algerians who had lived in demolished bidonvilles as too ‘un-

evolved’ – in effect, insufficiently European – to move immediately into HLM apartments and

mix with the general population. As such, first they had to live in cités de transit (transit centres),

which were de facto spaces of Europeanisation.59

Indeed, European immigrants, for instance

those from Eastern Europe and the Iberian peninsula who were preferred and sought out by the

Ministry of Labour after 1962,60

were notably exempt from the obligation to acculturate in these

low standard and shoddily maintained lodgings.61

Despite the steadfastness of such Orientalist

convictions about the unsuitability of Algerians to inhabit Paris, there were occasional

admissions of the apriorism of this reasoning. Melissa Byrnes cites a Paris housing official who

assumed that Portuguese families would be ‘relatively easy to rehouse, given their degree of

evolution, their resources, and the stability of their employment, that is their occidental

civilization.’ In fact, Byrnes points out, Portuguese workers often turned out to be perceived as

more problematic for the housing officials than North Africans.62

A core part of transit camp life was compulsory education in which occupants were

taught the skills supposedly needed to adapt to modern life, so as eventually to be able to mix

with the general population.63

In a disavowal of the liberty promised by modernity to define

oneself, modernisation was here unreflexively equated with Europeanisation.64

This corresponds

59

SONACOTRA construction of the first transit cities began in 1959 with the first completed in 1960 and 1961.

They were all located adjacent to existing bidonvilles. Prakash, Empire on the Seine, 287. The Société nationale de

construction de logements pour les travailleurs was the successor to SONACOTRAL – the Société nationale de

construction de logements pour les travailleurs algériens. See Marc Bernardot, ‘Chronique d’une institution: la

SONACOTRA (1956-1976)’, Sociétés contemporaines 33-34 (1999), 39-58. 60

Lyons, ‘Social Welfare, French Muslims and decolonization in France’, 83. 61

On the conditions of the cités de transit see Prakash, Empire on the Seine, 287. 62

Byrnes, French like Us?, 183. 63

Lyons, ‘Social Welfare, French Muslims and decolonization in France’, 78. 64

Moustafa Bayoumi, ‘Shadows and Light: Colonial Modernity and the Grande Mosquée of Paris’, The Yale

Journal of Criticism 13/2 (Fall, 2000), 272.

77

to Todd Shepard’s argument that from the later years of the Algerian war, officials reframed their

civilising mission as a ‘“modernizing mission”’.65

The ‘normal’ citizen that the Algerian

immigrant was to become would eschew radical politics, embrace nuclear family life, pay rent

regularly and respect property, spend time outside work looking after family responsibilities and

the pursuit of the comforts of the booming consumer society.66

Once again, then, housing policy

linked Europeanisation with depoliticisation. An additional advantage of Europeanisation as a

rationale for the transit centres was that the long years in which North Africans were left in them

were self-justifying:67

the longer they were confined there, the more they could be said not to

have Europeanised, thus legitimising their continued residence and the prolonged existence of

such centres. This was a variation, brought home to the metropole, of what James McDougall

describes as European imperialism’s externalisation of its own violence onto its victims.68

The educational aims of the transit camps fitted into a broader discourse about the need

for Algerian migrants in particular to Europeanise. This stressed domesticity and adherence to

standards of housekeeping, cleaning and ‘dirt’, the acquisition and use of French furniture,

cooking skills, childcare and management of the household budget.69

Also, in a parallel to the

Europeanisation of the pieds noirs, the standards by which these migrants were judged included

adherence to standards of sexuality and assimilation to European family norms, especially in

65

Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 6. 66

Lyons, ‘Social Welfare, French Muslims and decolonization in France’, 75; Prakash, Empire on the Seine, 274. 67

Amit Prakash notes that families were supposed to ‘transition’ out of these centres on the outskirts of Paris after a

maximum of two years. However, many families actually remained there for between ten and thirteen years and

emerged angry at the French state for their isolation and abandonment. See Prakash, Empire on the Seine, 288. 68

James McDougall, ‘Savage Wars? Codes of Violence in Algeria, 1830s-1990s’, Third World Quarterly 26/1

(2005), 119-120. 69

Neil MacMaster, ‘Shantytown Republics: Algerian Migrants and the Culture of Space in the Bidonvilles’, in

Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, eds. Hafid Gafaïti, Patricia M.E. Lorcin, & David

G. Troyansky (Lincoln, Nebraska & London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 84.

78

regard to the size of the family.70

While it was true that North African families tended to be

larger, it was disingenuous to imply this was a natural point of cultural demarcation between

European and non-European. As Byrnes argues, ‘during the interwar years, similar concerns had

been raised regarding a “Spanish invasion;” small families were not necessarily an occidental

tradition.’71

What is more, in the immediate post-war years Algerian women were actually

awarded medals for the number of children to which they gave birth as part of the French state’s

drive to regenerate the nation’s population.72

Neil MacMaster argues that French policy on domestic behaviour was characterised by a

rigid opposition between modernity and tradition.73

If this opposition was equivalent to the

binary of European and non-Europe, it co-existed contradictorily with the scales of adaptation to

Eurocentric domestic norms against which immigrants were measured – in effect a scale on

which Europeanness faded away as one went down from the criteria of the normal French

citizen.74

What each register had in common, though, was that they corresponded to Dipesh

Chakrabarty’s observation about various forms of European and indeed non-European discourse,

in which the non-European world is perennially required to catch up with Europe, and its

correlative characteristics of modernity, progress and reason.75

One can add to Chakrabarty’s

argument that this was the case not only for non-European nations but also for what were

deemed non-European peoples living in Europe. Such discourse seemed more an example of

70

Algerians were not the only immigrant group subjected to stereotypes and behavioural norms according to sexual

and familial stereotypes. See for example Felix Germain, ‘Jezebels and Victims: Antillean Women in Postwar

France, 1946-1974’, French Historical Studies 33/ 3 (Summer, 2010), 475-495. 71

Byrnes, French like Us ?, 186. 72

See Sophia Lamri, ‘“Algériennes” et mères françaises exemplaires (1945-1962)’, Le mouvement social 199

(2002), 61-81. 73

MacMaster, ‘Shantytown Republics’, 88. 74

Prakash, for example, points to the deployment of social councilors in the bidonvilles that categorised the degree

of assimilation of families on a scale running from ‘A’ to ‘D’. See Prakash, Empire on the Seine, 281. 75

See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2000).

79

Aimé Césaire’s reference to Europe’s propensity for self-congratulation than an accurate

diagnosis of the situation and needs of Algerian immigrants. As one exasperated inhabitant of the

bidonvilles in Nanterre exclaimed in a refutation of the notion that Algerian migrants relished

backward living conditions: ‘il parait que nous voulons habiter dans la boue et que nous refusons

de nous ouvrir au progrès.’76

In this regard, it is telling that Amelia Lyons argues that

responsibility for integration was placed entirely on the Algerian immigrants whose objections

could only be problematic, never valid, and from whom the French authorities had nothing to

learn.77

Or, more precisely, exclusion had to be self-inflicted since by definition it could not be a

product of the universalist French Republic.

Another form of habitation that was made available for Algerian immigrants was the

SONACOTRA foyers. These dormitory-style lodgings were populated by single, male workers,

predominantly from North Africa and later from West Africa.78

This approach was likewise

undercut by the contradictory approach of French housing policy. As Amit Prakash points out,

these foyers were paradoxically intended to stem anti-colonial sentiment by offering Algerian

men much needed accommodation and ease their transition into French society. But in practice

they were segregated away from the rest of the French population on the outermost peripheries

of Paris.79

Though regulations and restrictions were tight, including the prohibition of protests or

meeting of a political character,80

residents were not required to attend classes to Europeanise

their comportment, as in the transit cities. However, a certain Europeanist ideology permeated

76

Abdelmalek Sayad & Éliane Dupuy, Un Nanterre algérien, terre de bidonvilles (Paris: Autrement, 1995), 42. 77

Lyons, ‘Social Welfare, French Muslims and decolonization in France’, 74. 78

Prakash, Empire on the Seine, 268-269. 79

Ibid. 80

Ibid., 272.

80

the institutions through the recruitment of ex-military personnel to manage the foyers.81

As late

as 1972, out of 151 foyer directors, 95 percent had military backgrounds, serving in Indochina,

Africa, or North Africa, 82

during which they had been instilled with a sense of the urgent need to

defend the West. Many residents unsurprisingly testified to having preferred living in bidonvilles

rather than transit cities or foyers that were encircled with chain-link fencing, governed by

authoritarian regulations, and monitored by ex-paratrooper concierges.83

French social workers, whether ex-military or otherwise, as such occupied a privileged

place as agents of Europeanisation. As François Villey, the head of the Public Health and

Population Ministry’s office for demographic, social, and familial policies, expressed it: with the

long-term help of specialised social workers, these Muslim women could adapt to the western

way of life. Gradually and patiently these workers might be able to instil ‘everything the lady of

the house and mother of a European family needs to know.’84

As Lyons summarises this

approach, ‘in order for the Muslim woman to become European, she had to accept the ways of

those more “enlightened” than herself – those who guarded the knowledge and practice of daily

life in France.’85

Indeed, a disproportionate amount of attention was paid to Algerian women

who were entrusted with the work of transforming their husbands and the next generation.86

One

should note that here that Lyons suggests that in the eyes of the French state, Algerians could in

principle become European. Europeanised here would thus mean achieving definitive

Europeanness rather than being made more European. But this sits uneasily with notions of race

81

For an analysis of how the discourse of the French military, including a certain kind of Europeanism, impacted on

Paris in relation to the management of North African migrants, see chapter 3. 82

Prakash, Empire on the Seine, 271. 83

Ibid., 290. See chapter 3 for a discussion of the paratrooper as an emblem of, depending on one’s viewpoint, the

defence of Europe or the savagery of imperial Europe. 84

Amelia H. Lyons, ‘The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole. Algerian Immigrants in France and the Politics of

Adaptation during Decolonization’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 32 (2006), 489. 85

Ibid., 492. 86

Ibid.

81

that Lyons also notes were retained by French government officials, even if they did not voice

them publicly.87

MacMaster outlines how such stipulations about the family connected to a traditional

European imperialist obsession with Muslim women. He writes that, ‘French colonial ideology

during the period from 1900 to 1962 was obsessed with the hegemonic project of invading,

conquering, and ‘liberating’ the last bastion of Algerian cultural and social resistance, the

Muslim woman, as well as the sealed-off domestic space that she inhabited.’88

Lyons concurs

that this kind of longstanding colonial policy was recycled in the metropole in this period. What

is more, the instruction of Algerian women facilitated access to the home which provided

intimate knowledge about this space and a kind of control previously unattainable.89

This is a

crucial point since it suggests that the French authorities did not consider non-Europeans to be

inherently objectionable or problematic, as long as they were controlled. In fact, the presence,

even production, of non-Europeans had a distinct value in terms of the paradoxes of the

universalism on which the French Republic prided itself. As Moustafa Bayoumi argues in his

discussion of the Grande mosquée of Paris, ‘you will always need to produce non-French

Muslims to show how successfully assimilationist the French creed is.’90

This suggests another

important sense of ‘Europeanisation’: the aim not to make European what is not, but rather the

extension of European control over, or domestication of, the non-European.

The embracing of non-European difference did not extend to enthusiasm for mixed

couples, however. That Algerian men would marry metropolitan women was a continual worry

87

Lyons, ‘Social Welfare, French Muslims and decolonization in France’, 76. 88

MacMaster, ‘Shantytown Republics’, 82. 89

Lyons, ‘The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole’, 492. 90

Bayoumi, ‘Shadows and Light’, 288.

82

and, if never publicly pronounced as such, was clearly not favoured.91

Moreover, the

disproportionate presence of single male Algerian workers was a constant concern for the French

authorities, and welfare policy was designed to promote their integration into the French

community in the framework of family life. Part of the impetus for the social welfare policy for

Algerians revolved around the priority of putting an end to single male worker migration and

encouraging family settlement that would stabilise and depoliticise the population, and also

ensure that Algerians did not intermarry with metropolitan French women in large numbers.92

These standards of Europeanisation were often problematic for Algerian immigrants who

often experienced HLM housing in Paris as both deeply alien and alienating, despite French

boasts about its cutting edge rationalism. Sometimes residents would try to alter or adapt an

apartment to alleviate this feeling and restore the familiarity of their own inherited domestic

habits. However, such actions often fostered an image of incoherence and impoverishment of the

house ‘that simply confirmed the French social worker and official perceptions of the

“uncivilized” nature of the migrants.’93

But why should French officials care about seemingly

trivial issues like, for instance, using a bedroom as a kitchen or to store a motor scooter?94

One

thinks here of Stoler’s argument about the inordinate attention colonial authorities paid to

boundary zones in order to police and reaffirm the distinction between coloniser and colonised,

European and non-European.95

In the same way, we can understand the disconcerting effect of

Algerian migrants creatively combining perceived traditional and modern norms, appearances,

91

Lyons, ‘Social Welfare, French Muslims and decolonization in France’, 75-76. On the subject of mixed couples

generally see Neil MacMaster, ‘The Role of European Women and the Question of Mixed Couples in the Algerian

Nationalist Movement in France, circa 1918-1962’, French Historical Studies 34/2 (2011), 357-386. 92

Lyons, ‘Social Welfare, French Muslims and decolonization in France’, 75. 93

MacMaster, ‘Shantytown Republics’, 87. 94

Ibid., 86. 95

See Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Sexual Affront and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of

Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia’, in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, eds.

Frederick Cooper & Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 198-237.

83

and behaviour, and in doing so displacing received understandings of European and non-

European.96

Instances of this would include examples of those both dressing traditionally and

lacking any grasp of the French language, and yet consuming and enjoying modern domestic

appliances.

French social workers also often ‘suspected that conformity to official regulation and

norms was a skilful ploy, an instrumental enactment of “correct” behavior, to gain strictly

pragmatic and material goals.’97

This does not necessarily contradict or qualify Prakash’s

assessment that policy aimed at educating immigrants on cultural forms and behaviour separated

thought and action, so that only conformity was asked for, not belief.98

On the other hand, this

might suggest that it was not only imperative that Algerians Europeanise, but they truly believed

in the Europeanisation that they underwent. This plausibly connected to the image of Algerian

fanaticism in their independence struggle. This was perhaps a projection of a certain inadequacy

in Europe’s self-definition, since the Europe of the trentes glorieuses did not for all its pragmatic

success inspire or even require a great deal of belief. The depoliticisation of the post-war

consumer society of Europe manifested less a consensual belief in the status quo than a distinct

lack of belief.99

This was indeed a concern for those like the Congress for Cultural Freedom

which advocated an idea of Europe alongside the notion of the end of ideology.100

96

MacMaster, ‘Shantytown Republics’, 88. 97

Ibid. 98

Prakash, Empire on the Seine, 280. 99

One can in part account for French reactions to Algerian, OAS, and pied noir militancy in relation to this

pragmatic post-war Europe. To borrow Terry Eagleton’s argument, besides the obvious primary reason of the

obscene consequences of their violence, it was so disturbing because exposure to the violence of those who, as it

were, believed in too much induced a recognition precisely of a European paucity of belief. See Terry Eagleton,

Holy Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). To draw another parallel with the Europe of the Cold War,

one might surmise that the contemporary invocations of totalitarian regimes that instituted complete mind control

was tenable, in spite of the scarcity of evidence, precisely as a projection of the lack of belief, beyond pragmatic

adherence, to the contemporary image of Europe. See Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 393. 100

See Iain Stewart, Raymond Aron and the Roots of the French Liberal Renaissance (PhD dissertation, University

of Manchester, 2011), chapter 3.

84

If the provision, albeit delayed indefinitely, of a home was the carrot of French housing

policy during the Algerian war, surveillance was the stick. In fact the two went hand in hand. We

have seen how this was the case in terms of the personnel and requirements in state-provided

accommodation, but it was also reinforced by the role of the Paris police, whose approach to the

Algerian immigrant community was informed by a certain understanding of Europe that oriented

its leadership by Maurice Papon. This is not to say that the rank and file of the Paris police

concurred unthinkingly with Papon’s worldview in which Europe was besieged by upstart

African and Asiatic peoples. In fact there were significant instances of resistance to it.101

But it is

still the case that his conviction of the need to counter aggressively this non-European threat

filtered through into the professional culture of the Paris police. This will be examined in more

depth in Chapter 3 given the significance of the encounter between Algerian migrants and the

police in the city’s streets. But in terms of the home, it is worth noting that in the summer of

1958, Papon’s Europeanist ideology informed an operation that remained in force until the end

of the conflict. Codenamed ‘Opérations meublés’, the putative aim of this initiative was to check

the legality of rent levels and living conditions and to compel landlords to carry out

improvements to the lodgings of Algerian immigrants. In reality, the purpose of the initiative was

to collect information on individual Algerians, establish a census of each lodging house, and to

chart the location of suspected groupings of FLN supporters or militants.102

Moreover, after each

of the operations, pro-French Algeria leaflets were distributed that pointed to, as one example,

the manipulative designs of two of Europe’s irredeemable Others – Moscow and Nasser.103

101

See Jim House & Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford & New York:

Oxford University Press, 2006). 102

Ibid., 72. 103

Prakash, Empire on the Seine, 172.

85

In sum, Algerians were to be Europeanised, and the terms in which they were to be so

related to conceptions of modernity, political affiliation, gender, family, sexuality. This was

reinforced by an impressive repertoire of administrative and surveillance techniques. Though this

section has suggested as much, it is worth expanding on the argument that criteria of

Europeanness and un-Europeanness were produced by the French state.

Housing Algerians and Ethnicisation

In considering these initiatives at various levels of the French state, it is important not to

project backwards the disconnection that is commonly drawn today between the French Republic

and French imperialism, each of which are rather distinct in the kinds of ideas of Europe they

tend to be aligned with. Françoise de Barros demonstrates that French housing policy in this

period of decolonisation was constituted through the importation, reconfiguration, and, crucially,

the strengthening of colonial terms of reference and management. Amongst these the notion of

‘Europeanness’ was paramount. For de Barros the understanding of racialism from the period in

which French officials were often formed in the 1930s,104

and the broader axiom inherited from

the nineteenth century of the incommensurability of Algerians with the ‘European race’, was

more reworked than rejected in post-war France. This judgement is supported by Lyons’ work on

welfare provision to Algerian immigrants and the perpetuation of a colonial mentality in the

metropole in the same period.105

In de Barros’ account, housing was one of the areas in which in

the continuity of both imperial management and mindset was most continuous before and after

104

Françoise de Barros, ‘Les Municipalités face aux Algériens: méconnaissances et usages des catégories coloniales

en métropole avant et après la seconde guerre mondiale’, Genèses 53 (December, 2003), 84. 105

Françoise de Barros, ‘Des “Français musulmans d’Algérie” aux “immigrés”. L’importation de classifications

coloniales dans les politiques du logement en France (1950-1970)’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 159

(2005), 28 ; Lyons, ‘Social Welfare, French Muslims and decolonization in France,’ 65-89.

86

Algerian independence in 1962. This contradicts conventional narratives in which Europe and

Europeanness arose as priorities at this moment precisely because the historical moment of

imperialism had passed.106

This was not a simple one-to-one reconstitution of imperial personnel,

categories and mentalities in the metropole, however, given the diffuse and contradictory

functions of French government agencies and personnel. A particularly interesting phenomenon

was the perpetuation and neglect of predominantly Algerian-populated shantytowns by left-wing

local authorities, rather than a generic ‘colonial state.’107

Moreover, Byrnes demonstrates that

there were significant differences between different municipal authorities in their policies

towards North Africans in Paris. 108

An important nuance of de Barros’s argument is that housing policy and discourse had an

active ‘ethnicising’ effect on the conceptualisation of immigrants which induced a sharp

demarcation between European and non-European. She notes that the administration charged

with ‘affaires musulmans’ or ‘affaires nord-africaines’ was itself a powerful producer of the

ethnicisation of Algerian immigrants. It was an institution of government which produced ‘une

frontière infranchissable entre les Algériens et les “Européens”.’109

Accordingly, we can talk

here about a performative administrative discourse of both Europeanisation and de-

Europeanisation. French housing policy in fact produced the difference that it purported to be

merely observing objectively and administrating accordingly. This was all the more striking as a

106

Emblematic of this line of thought is the anecdote of Anthony Eden telephoning Guy Mollet, who was in a

meeting with Konrad Adenauer, to call a halt to Britain and France’s 1956 Suez offensive. Adenauer then told

Mollet that European nations had to unite against an America that might otherwise divide up the world with the

Soviets. ‘Europe will be your revenge’, promised the German Chancellor. See See Matthew James Connelly, A

Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2002), 121. 107

See Olivier Masclet, ‘Du “bastion” au “ghetto”. Le communisme municipal en butte à l’immigration’, Actes de la

recherche en sciences sociales 159 (2005), 10-25 ; Olivier Masclet, ‘Une municipalité communiste face à

l’immigration algérienne et marocaine. Gennevilliers, 1950-1972’, Genèses 45 (2001), 150-163. 108

Byrnes. French like U s?, passim. 109

De Barros, ‘Des “Français musulmans d’Algérie” aux “immigrés”’, 28.

87

policy given that Algerian Muslims in France were juridically equal French citizens, at least until

1962. Étienne Balibar argues that ‘in fact it is the state qua nation-state which actually produces

national or pseudo-national “minorities” (ethnic, cultural, occupation). Were it not for its

juridical and political intervention, these would remain merely potential. Minorities only exist in

actuality from the moment when they are codified and controlled.’110

The significance of this is

that the state is not something standing above and mediating in a disinterested fashion between

‘Europeans’ and ‘non-European’ immigrants, but that discrimination or racism is ‘a relationship

to the Other mediated by the intervention of the state.’111

Rancière also notes how this

categorisation of ‘immigrants’ by the state replaced the term ‘worker’, which was a term that

could have articulated a politics of equality.112

Algerians, as such, were as non-European

immigrants legislated out of a claim to an equal right to the city that was proclaimed to be the

capital of Europe.

Europeanisation and the Paris Bidonvilles

In terms of the spatial dimensions of the bidonvilles and their connection to Europe, de

Barros notes that strong distinctions were drawn in physical space between Europeanness and

non-Europeanness.113

This was true not only of the bidonvilles, of course. A 1957 Le Monde

report on the area of la Goutte-d’Or, for instance, referred interchangeably to ‘Parisiens de

souche’ and ‘les Européens’, who were supposedly fleeing the area in the face of its alarming

110

Balibar, ‘Es Gibt Keinen Staat in Europa’, 15. 111

Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 112

Jacques Rancière, ‘Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization’, October 61 (Summer, 1992), 63. 113

De Barros, ‘Des “Français musulmans d’Algérie” aux “immigrés”’, 28.

88

Arabisation.114

Prakash notes that these Parisians of ‘stock’, which is to say native Parisians,

were in fact for the most part of provincial or European migrant origins.115

The historical

fractures that had accompanied the entry of these groups into Paris were forgotten here, and

replaced by a stark opposition of Europeans to Arabs.

Such concerns about the congregation of North Africans were voiced in regard to the

allocation of HLM slots as well. Byrnes highlights the remarks of Jean Vaujour, the Director

General of SONACOTRAL, who warned in 1961 that unless allocations were carefully

apportioned, ‘instead of “Occidentalizing” the Muslims, a reverse “Arabization” of the French

would occur.’116

His remarks echoed contemporary prevalent theories about the inherent conflict

or disequilibria between Europe and the Orient.117

If in this section we examine discourse about

Europe and Europeanness only in relation to the bidonvilles, it is not because they were unique in

terms of the spatial representation of these categories, but that the distinction between European

and non-European was drawn most starkly with reference to these settlements. For, as

MacMaster emphasises, the shantytowns ‘served the function of the lowest denominator, the

form of immigrant housing that was most in opposition to the model of society that social

workers shared.’118

The bidonvilles were informal, makeshift settlements that peppered the outskirts of Paris

and other French cities from the early post-Second World War years, and were not completely

114

‘Heures chaudes dans le “medina” de Paris’, Le Monde, (21 June, 1957). Prakash notes how such representations

were overstated given that a police report of 1952 put the Algerians inhabiting the area at 10.2 % of the population.

The Algerian population thereafter increased slightly in the 1950s, before beginning to decline after the early 1960s.

See Prakash, Empire on the Seine, 132. 115

Prakash, Empire on the Seine, 137. 116

Byrnes, French like Us?, 178-179. 117

See Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution, passim. 118

MacMaster, ‘Shantytown Republics’, 85.

89

removed until the 1970s.119

It is important to note that shantytowns in France also housed

Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and indeed French, as well as North African residents. However, the

latter were disproportionately represented in the most deprived of these settlements.120

Moreover,

de Barros notes that in the 1950s the term bidonville designated French Algerian Muslims just as

much as the terms ‘casba’ or ‘gourbi’.121

In the same vein, predominantly Portuguese inhabited

bidonvilles were often referred to in other terms. Nor was there evidence of a perception of a

parallel between the Algerian settlements and the ‘zone’ on the periphery of Paris in which

provincial and European, especially Belgian, Polish, and Italian, migrants lived in ramshackle

dwellings well into the 1940s.122

In this section two kinds of discourse of Europeanisation will be examined as they related

to the bidonvilles. The first inferred that the shantytowns were constitutively non-European and

as such irredeemably out of place in Paris. This rested on some dubious premises, but also relied

on a certain degree of collusion from the bidonvilles residents in their own devaluation. The

second form of Europeanising discourse about these settlements consisted in a limited but real

refusal of this devaluation of the residents of the settlements. This is an example of

Europeanisation as a refusal of the closure of the terms of Europe or Europeanness, which in this

case involved an insistence on being no less a part of this Paris that was reckoned to be a

European capital.

Europeanisation as Rejection of the Bidonvilles from Paris

119

See for further details Hugh McDonnell, ‘Water, North African Immigrants, and the Parisian Bidonvilles, 1950s-

1960s’, Radical History Review (Spring, 2013), 31-58. 120

Moroccans and Tunisians tended to arrive in France in greater numbers later in the 1960s. 121

De Barros, ‘Des “Français musulmans d’Algérie” aux “immigrés”’, 28. 122

Prakash, Empire on the Seine, 228.

90

In terms of the spatial dimensions of the bidonvilles and their connection to Europe, de

Barros notes that strong distinctions were drawn in physical space in terms of Europeanness or

non-Europeanness.123

Accordingly, the bidonville was conceived not merely as a place where

Algerian immigrants lived, but as an expression or manifestation of their character, as a non- or

anti-European space that was more than the sum of its non- or anti-European parts. Sayad

described the bidonville as ‘une ville rejetée par la ville… une ville qui n’est pas ville… une ville

qui ne sera jamais ville lors même qu’elle est au sein de la ville.’124

One can add to this that it

was accordingly a non-European or indeed anti-European supplement to de Gaulle’s ‘de facto

capital of Europe’.125

This sense of neglect and rejection was expressly felt by many inhabitants of the

bidonvilles. Interestingly, given our examination of Paris as a sanitised European space for

tourism, Sayad quotes the frequent wish of the bidonvilles inhabitants that foreign tourists would

come to see the settlements, to examine their impoverishment and photograph it to shame the

French authorities who perpetuated this impoverishment.126

On the other hand, a former

bidonville inhabitant, Mohammed Kenzi, recollects anger at foreign tourists who photographed

what were taken to be quaint Third World enclaves on the edge of Paris.127

But this merely

confirmed the point that the space was taken to be a non-European anomaly in the post-war

European capital. Accordingly, in referring to the bidonvilles, allusions were made to Casbahs,

123

De Barros, ‘Des “Français musulmans d’Algérie” aux “immigrés”’, 28. 124

Sayad & Dupuy, Un Nanterre algérien, 15-16. 125

Wakeman, The Heroic City, 343. 126

Sayad & Dupuy, Un Nanterre algérien, 88. 127

Mohammed Kenzi, La menthe sauvage (Lutry: Éditions Jean-Marie Bouchain, 1984), 47.

91

Medinas, Calcutta, or American Indian reserves.128

Similar references to non-European space

were employed to highlight most Parisians’ detachment from and indifference to their

neighbours in the shantytowns. As the journal Pax Christi France described the bidonvilles,

‘bien que géographiquement proche de nous, ils sont psychologiquement aussi loin que les plus

lointains pays. Pour bien des Parisiens, les bidonvilles de Nanterre ou de la Campa sont-ils plus

proches que Zanzibar ou le Rwanda?’129

One should add though that not all the shantytowns

were treated in the same manner at government level. The Portuguese bidonvilles of Champigny

in the eastern suburbs, for instance, benefited from joint municipal-FAS projects to ‘humanise’

the settlement by providing electricity, water, and trash collection.130

As Byrnes notes, ‘no such

projects were launched in the region’s predominantly North African bidonvilles.’131

This performative discourse of segregation was closely connected to the common idea

that the bidonvilles residents ‘chose’ to live there, or that, in what amounted to the same thing,

they lived there because they were irredeemably feckless. As the journal Pax Christi France put

it, ‘combien de personnes… pensent que les bidonvilles ne sont habités que par des asociaux, des

chômeurs constitutionnels, des incapables, des irrécupérables se complaisant dans la saleté et la

misère?’132

Bidonvilles residents in fact commonly expressed resentment about the idea that they

chose to live there. Furthermore, it was a notion that connected to the idea that the bidonvilles

were not strictly speaking a Parisian space at all, but rather a foreign, North African importation.

128

See for example Noël Copin, ‘Les casbahs de Paris’ in La vie catholique illustrée (Month not indicated, 1961) in

FMH. ARC 3019 -2. 1. Dossier général chronologique; Monique Hervo, Chroniques du bidonville: Nanterre en

guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 26; Sayad & Dupuy, Un Nanterre algérien, 88; Prakash, Empire on the Seine,

264. 129

‘Un monde “à part”. Les bidonvilles’, Pax Christi France (March, 1964) in FMH. ARC 3019 -2. 1. Dossier

général chronologique. 130

Byrnes, French like Us?, 184. 131

Ibid. 132

‘Un monde “à part”.’ The article went on to argue that the reality was quite different from this perception.

92

It is in this sense that one can critique the historian Leif Jerram’s recent interpretation of

the shantytowns.133

It is curious that as part of his plea for attention to the micro-unit of history

as a point of scholarly precision, Jerram’s analysis of the bidonville is quite ahistorical. In his

reading, the HLM that surround Paris have been unfairly denigrated, since they were certainly an

improvement over the shantytowns from which many of its occupants had come. This is all the

more noteworthy since Jerram is especially attentive to the secondary obscure or subtle

manifestations of power in European urban history, for instance prerogatives of the welfare state

which were not merely intrusive but also techniques of biopolitical government. He documents

how the right to acquire a flat built for social housing purposes in European cities from the 1950s

was explicitly linked to conformity to norms of heterosexual relations and family life.134

Yet he

accepts at face value the pure intentions of the French state with regard to its policy towards the

bidonvilles and their inhabitants, going as far as to credit its ‘passion to alleviate suffering.’135

Jerram’s claims are not wrong, but unsatisfactory. Indeed, there were many sincere and

committed French social workers. House and MacMaster even demonstrate how the resistance of

social workers to state violence proved problematic for Papon’s direction of the police targeting

of Algerians which culminated in the killings of 17 October 1961.136

But Jerram’s point is

incidental to de Barros’s more probing analysis of the permeation of colonial discourse and

exclusionary invocation of Europeanness in the systemic political logic of housing policy.

Furthermore, Jerram’s rush to defend the moral fibre of welfare officials as individuals has the

ideological effect of obscuring the fact that the existence of the bidonvilles was in the first place

not a neutral fact or zero point for French civil servants to administrate.

133

Jerram, Streetlife, 372-373, 377, 384. Jerram also omits the difficulties, discrimination, and delays involved in

bidonvilles residents securing a place in the HLM. 134

Ibid., 300. 135

Ibid., 373. 136

House & MacMaster, Paris 1961, 144-146.

93

Though Jerram never alludes to their origin, the Paris bidonvilles were in fact

symptomatic of a constellation of trends within post-war European imperialism and

capitalism.137

Their inhabitants’ ranks were swelled with Algerians escaping the French military

campaign in Algeria, notably the policy of uprooting indigenous communities and resettling

them in camps.138

Immigration in general, including into the bidonvilles, was further prompted

by European capital accumulation processes that powered the trentes glorieuses, which required

cheap foreign labour and, as Judt argues, the deliberate imposition of insecurity on foreign

workers.139

That the shantytowns were as such not a non-European intrusion was appreciated by

those who campaigned on behalf of the residents. The President of the Amitié Nord-africaine de

Nanterre (ANAN) argued that these residents were ‘des gens qui pour bien des raisons sont

presque en droit de l’exiger de nous, société, qui portons à tous les échelons la responsabilité de

cet état de chose.’140

But more typically the bidonvilles were represented as archetypically non-European or

anti-European, when in fact they were symptomatic of the complicated intertwining of various

modes of European violence. In this sense, Slavoj Žižek’s differentiation and discussion of these

modes is illuminating: ‘subjective violence is just the most visible portion of a triumvirate that

also includes two objective kinds of violence. First, there is a “symbolic” violence embodied in

language and its forms, what Heidegger would call “our house of being”… Second, there is what

I call “systemic” violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of

137

Apart from the housing of Algerian migrants in relation to the ongoing war, Amelia Lyons also points to French

official preoccupation with the competition with other core Europeans states for cheap non-European or peripheral

European labour. See Lyons, ‘Social Welfare, French Muslims and Decolonization in France’, 84. 138

MacMaster, ‘Shantytown Republics’, 74. 139

Judt, Postwar, 337. It is ironic in this regard that Algerian workers in the metropole had even fewer rights as

French citizens prior to 1962 than they had thereafter when the new Algerian government demanded certain

safeguards in their employment. See Lyons, ‘Social Welfare, French Muslims and decolonization in France’, 83. 140

Report of J. Bellanger, the president of Amitié Nord-africaine de Nanterre. 1957 in FMH. ARC 3019 -2. 1.

Dossier général chronologique.

94

our economic and political systems.’141

Having taken no account of the visible subjective

violence of police repression of Algerian immigrants in the integral policy of moving them from

bidonvilles to the HLMs, Jerram unsurprisingly also takes no account of the ‘symbolic’ violence

of their labelling as excluded non-Europeans, nor of the objective violence of European capitalist

and colonialist systems which manifested themselves in the acceptance of Algerians as a

particularly disposable and exploitable population.

The Bidonvilles, the Gaze, and Europeanisation

In a televised debate with Alain Badiou in May 2010, the French philosopher Alain

Finkelkraut reproached Muslims in France over the issue of the veil. French society is defined by

‘the exchange of looks,’ he insisted.142

It is curious that an important formative experience in

postcolonial France, with which Finkelkraut is so uncomfortable, was precisely that of the look.

Indeed, the experience of the gaze, whether at the North Africans’s muddy appearance in public

or while they hauled cans of water from outside communal taps, was one of the most commented

upon aspects of bidonville life, as well as of one of the most painful to bear.143

A key distinction

of this experience from Finkelkraut’s invocation of the look was the absence of the reciprocity

and equality that he presupposes.

Mud, which as Sayad notes was the quintessential mark of bidonville life,144

perhaps

functioned here as an alibi for the looks of contempt that Parisians extended to those inhabitants.

141

Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideway Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008), 1. 142

See http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xddsqw_badiou-finkielkraut-debat-part2_webcam# 143

Sayad & Dupuy, Un Nanterre algérien, 43. 144

Ibid., 45.

95

In an age in which, as Frederick Cooper argues, racial justifications were no longer explicitly

serviceable, the muddied appearance of the bidonvilles residents served as a material disavowal

of Fanon’s observation that it is the racist who creates his object.145

To the extent that one had

something tangible to point to, rather than refer back to expired racial ideas, the French observer

expunged him or herself of (neo)colonial guilt. One thereby confirmed a practical understanding

that the superior place of the European in Paris was obvious, natural and unimpeachable rather

than arbitrary and unjust.

The experience of being gazed at by the neighbours of the settlements was consistently

remarked upon as engendering a deep sense of shame and humiliation. In November 1965,

France-Soir republished a letter from a former resident of the La Folie settlement in Nanterre as

part of a series in the newspaper examining bidonvilles in the French capital: ‘I am writing to

you on the subject of your campaign against the bidonvilles… I wouldn’t go back there for all

the money in the world, not even for a week. I know all about the corvée d’eau… we were

subjected to the most contemptuous looks from so-called “normal” neighbors as the tap was

located on a main road.’146

This shame, which was induced by pitying and contemptuous looks alike, could even

take on a corporeal sense, as powerfully described by a Moroccan couple interviewed by Hervo.

The husband regretted that every time he performed this task he was ashamed, that he would

hide his body from view if he could. Indeed, his wife remarked that ‘he always lowers his head.

145

See Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 2005); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New

York: Grove Press, 1967), 93. 146

Thérèse Nadji, ‘Je sors de l’enfer des bidonvilles, voilà ce que c’est.’ France-Soir, November 13, 1965in FMH.

ARC 3019 -2. 1. Dossier général chronologique. The corvée d’eau was the process of collecting water from

common outside taps.

96

If he could put it in a hole he’d do so because he is so ashamed [il a trop de honte].’147

Likewise,

another testified that he was quite aware that he was lowly, nothing admirable like a doctor or a

lawyer. And yet still, it ‘makes you suffer when you feel from their look they are always marking

a difference… that they always manage to make you understand that you’re not of their

world.’148

Seemingly, then, this momentary practical gesture was as powerful a means of

discourse as any to objectivate a barrier between the European and non-European.

In his study of the suffering of immigrants, Sayad analyses the impact of the increasingly

felt sense of distance from the country of origin. This also arises in the memoirs of bidonville

residents.149

The experience of the look was in a sense a reminder of this detachment and

displacement. For the shame it engendered contrasted utterly from Sartre’s encapsulation of the

rising mood of self-empowerment in the non-European world and the reversal of European

hegemony in his ‘Black Orpheus’ of 1948:

Here are black men standing, looking at us, and I hope that you – like me – will feel the shock of

being seen. For three thousand years, the white man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing without

being seen… Today, these black men are looking at us, and our gaze comes back to our own

eyes; in their turn, black torches light up the world and our white heads are no more than chinese

[sic] lanterns swinging in the wind.150

In his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre reminded his reader

that for Marx shame was a revolutionary sentiment. The bidonvilles residents were heavily

involved in the demonstrations on and around 17 October 1961, one aim of which was the

restitution of dignity. But this claim to dignity was out of joint with the experience at being

147

Monique Hervo & Marie-Ange Charras, Bidonvilles: l’enlisement (Paris: Maspero, 1971), 36. This work contains

transcripts of interviews conducted with the residents of La Folie from between 1965 and 1968, but one can surmise

that the experience described by the resident here was comparable to that of residents in the1950s and early 1960s. 148

Sayad & Dupuy, Un Nanterre algérien, 50. 149

See for example Kenzi, La menthe sauvage, 36-37. 150

Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Black Orpheus’, trans. John MacCombie, The Massachusetts Review 6/1 (1964 – 1965), 13.

97

looked at, which seemed better to correspond to the disabling sense of shame Fanon pointed to in

his White Skins, Black Masks, which is a useful text to make sense of the experience of the

bidonvilles residents. Fanon’s advance over the early Sartre’s phenomenological approach was to

insist that in the colonial situation the gaze is not merely the gaze of an Other, that there is also a

relationship of mastery and superiority and inferiority, whether real or imagined.151

The

testimonies of the bidonvilles inhabitants immediately recall Fanon’s succinct summary of the

lived experience of the Black man or woman in a white world: ‘shame. Shame and self-

contempt. Nausea.’152

Robert Young explains that from Sartre’s account of how a lack of self-

worth is mediated by the look of the Other, Fanon developed an insight into the mechanics of

how colonialism was able to produce a sense of inferiority in colonial subjects, how the colonial

gaze turned the subject into an object.153

Fanon also analysed the importance of appearance in these kinds of phenomenological

power relations. He described how the objectification of the Black differs from that of the Jew, in

that the latter can sometimes pass unnoticed in terms of his physical appearance. The appearance

of the North African inhabitants of the bidonvilles was doubly marked: in the first instance

because of their Maghrebian features, and in the second because of the public appearance of

carrying water or the pervasiveness of the inescapable and distinctive mud and dirt of bidonville

life. A water carrier from the Souf area described the humiliation of being looked at when

carrying water, the mocking smiles, the assumption that they North Africans were equivalent to

worms or rats, and the sense of superiority that permeated the French people’s gazes. But,

instructively, he added ‘between us, they’re right. They are on the right side [ils sont du bon

151

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 138n. 152

Ibid., 116. 153

Robert J.C. Young, “Preface. Sartre the “African Philosopher”,”, in Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and

Neocolonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, & Terry McWilliams (London & New York: Routledge,

2006), xiv.

98

côté.]’154

This was an unexceptional example of the phenomenon of inhabitants of the bidonvilles

colluding with the terms of the justification of their disenfranchisement, and the corresponding

hierarchy between the French and immigrants, Europeans and non-Europeans. Often the extreme

sense of ‘shame of oneself,’ as Sayad describes it, was coterminous with a distinct sense in

which its inhabitants often accepted their disenfranchisement in the social hierarchy. They thus

limited their claims to a minimal relief of their material impoverishment, and drew short of

attacking the pathological constitution of the division between European and non-European, for

which Fanon’s work held out hope.

Spatialisation, and (De-)Europeanisation

It is argued here that the gaze of the French neighbours of the bidonvilles was more than

a gesture of contempt. Rather, it had a further value in terms of identity and placement in the

sense of instilling social hierarchy. That is to say that this practice of looking at the bidonvilles

and their residents had a powerful effect of inculcating a distinction in terms of Europeanness

and non-Europeanness. In his discussion of the Paris Grande mosquée, Bayoumi argued that ‘its

putative purity of North African form within the fifth arrondissement was an attempt to force the

presence of colonial North African subjects into visibility and containment.’155

In part the gaze at

the shantytowns was an attempt to achieve some degree of comparable control, though the

autonomy of the settlements did not permit this to the extent of the mosque, which was

constructed and regulated by the French state.

154

Sayad & Dupuy, Un Nanterre algérien, 54-55. 155

Bayoumi, ‘Shadows and Light’, 41.

99

To understand this, it is useful to turn to the work of Jacques Rancière, particularly in

terms of his theories of spatialisation and fixing people in their place. Rancière invokes a scene

from Roberto Rossellini’s film Europa 51 to examine the bourgeois outsider encountering and

being turned by the experience of an alterity which then transforms and converts the outsider.

But it is suggested here that its outlining of the process of spatialisation can usefully be

appropriated to explicate processes of (de-)Europeanisation at work with regard to looking at the

bidonvilles and their residents. Rancière writes,

Of course, those narratives were an appeal to fear and pity. I would assume, however, that this

was not the main point. The first concern was not provoking fear and pity. It was localizing.

Horrible as the underworld may be, it is still a world. It is a place where you can find the disease

of society, designate and touch it with your fingers. People are pitiful or dreadful but they are

there, clinging to their place, identical to themselves – and all the more identical to themselves as

they have less self, as their ‘self’ is hardly distinct from the dirt and mud which is ‘their’ place.

The descent into hell is not simply a pitiful visit to the land of the poor – it is also a way of

making sense, a procedure of meaning… Frightening as it might seem, it was still reassuring to

envisage society as threatened by a power lying beneath it, in the underground. Because the main

threat would lie in the discovery that society had no underground: no underground because it had

no ground at all. The enigma and threat of democracy is not the army of the shadows in the

underground. The enigma and threat of democracy is merely its own indeterminacy. This means

that people have no place, that they are not ‘identical’ to themselves: that indeterminacy in fact is

a permanent challenge to the rationality of policy and the rationality of social knowledge.

Spatialization is a way of conjuring with the challenge of safely grounding reasonable democracy

and rational social knowledge.156

Sayad, of course, noted the various ways in which the bidonville residents were revealed

as, or made to feel, out of place. But, to borrow and adapt Rancière’s argument, in another sense

they were very much in their place. If the bidonville was considered quintessentially non-

156

Jacques Rancière, ‘Discovering New Worlds: Politics of Travel and Metaphors of Space’, in Travellers’ Tales:

Narratives of Home and Displacement, eds. George Robertson et al (London & New York: Routledge, 1994), 33-34.

100

European or anti-European, to go to it or to see it was also to place it, to fix it and its inhabitants

in their place. Here ‘it was there, identical to itself because it was identical to the occupation of

space.’157

The spatialisation of the bidonvilles corresponded to the de-Europeanisation of its

inhabitants and the reaffirmation of the Europeanness of those who were not of the bidonvilles. It

was a re-inscription of a division between de Gaulle’s capital of Europe and the bidonville as

casbah in a representation of opposition as stark as Fanon’s famous depiction of the colonial

city.158

As such, it is instructive that Sayad notes that the feeling of humiliation and shame that

the gaze induced was, in fact, all the more pronounced in situation of anonymity when it was

aimed randomly at any resident as a collective reaction against the bidonville as a whole.159

To continue the analogy with Rancière’s analysis, the bidonvilles might be regarded by

Parisians as primitive and frightening, but a bidonville in its non-European place was less

frightening than not being able to locate the contours of the societal hierarchy of European and

non-European. And certainly less disturbing than the notion that that society’s hierarchy was

arbitrary and artificial or even ephemeral – a fear which was all the more present in an age when

the certainties of Europe’s imperial place in the world were quickly exposed as credulous and

complacent. The contestation and defence of Europe and Europeanness in this period was indeed

closely connected to this question of social rank and place.160

The according of place that Rancière describes here correlates closely to the experience

of the Paris bidonvilles in terms of the notion that the residents chose to live there. For if they

were in ‘their place’ in the bidonvilles, this was all the more self-evident if they chose to be

157

Ibid., 32. 158

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 30. 159

Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, 43. 160

One thinks immediately of Fanon’s depiction of the instilling of hierarchy between European and non-European

in the use of ‘pidgin-nigger’ or patois French to speak to Antilleans or Francophone Africans. This was to express

the sentiment that ‘“You’d better keep your place.”’ Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 34.

101

there. Of course, the feelings of the Algerian residents were mixed. Some suffered enormously

from the material deprivation; others found the settlements convivial nonetheless. But the point

here is that the notion that they chose to live there was an a priori dismissal of their claims. In

Rancièrian terms, to say they chose to live there was to say there was no ‘part of no part.’ De

Gaulle’s Paris, the capital of Europe, did not systematically preclude any part from equality, all

parts were counted.161

Rancière’s thought is useful to understand the experience of gaze to which the bidonvilles

residents were subjected in two ways, then. First, it functioned as a process of spatialisation in

which their non-European residents were put in their place in a reinforced social hierarchy. This

connected, secondly, to a contradictory notion with which it coexisted: the residents chose to live

there, thus preempting any claim to equality and to dispute their abjection in this capital of

Europe in which the ‘police order’ denied that any part was excluded.

Europeanisation as Validation of the Bidonvilles

Despite many instances of internalising the rationalisations of their depreciated status in

Paris, there was also a sense in which the bidonvilles were alternatively Europeanised. That is to

say that alternative discourses disputed the invocation of Europeanness to exclude the Algerian

residents of the shantytowns from an equal right to the city. Furthermore, in doing so, these

implied an interrogation of the very meaning of Europeanness as it was conventionally used.

161

A particular perverse instance of this axiom was Papon’s claim that Algerian migrants were transparently equal

as demonstrated by their possibility of enlisting in the harkis, who, as we have seen, aggressed inhabitants of the

bidonvilles and Algerian immigrants in general. House & MacMaster, Paris 1961, 78.

102

Recent work has juxtaposed the experience of the Algerians in Paris generally, and the

bidonvilles in particular, with the Jewish experience of segregation under European fascism.

Michael Rothberg points to figures like Marguerite Duras and her November 1961 article in

France-Observateur, ‘Les deux ghettos,’ as an example of multidirectional memory.

Accompanied by a photograph of the appalling conditions of a bidonville in Nanterre, the article

centred around two interconnected interviews: the first with two Algerian workers and the

second with a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto. The juxtaposition of the two memories does not

imply competition but rather is seen by Rothberg as representing an impetus to mutually

productive reflections.162

Rothberg further argues that the ideological and policy shifts that

Shepard describes in terms of the relation between France and Europe, Frenchness and

Europeanness, indeed disenfranchised racialised minorities. Yet the ideological incoherence of

these shifts also created a space in which intellectuals and activists like Duras ‘could link the

contemporary crisis to past events that had not yet received their due.’163

Given the integrity of

the experience of fascism and colonialism to Europe, it follows that work like Duras’s can be

thought of as a Europeanising space, in the sense of ‘Europeanisation’ as the contesting of any

closed understanding of Europe, and disclosing and foregrounding other histories that needed to

be accounted for in any attempt at articulating the meaning of the continent.

One might add another thread to these entangled histories by pointing to the fact that

some Algerian inhabitants of the bidonvilles were Second World War veterans, and considered

themselves to have contributed to the liberation of Europe. As such, their habitation in the

bidonvilles was felt to be an unjust depreciation of their contribution to the continent in which

they now found themselves so devalued. Of one particular resident in the La Folie shantytown,

162

See Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), chapter 8. 163

Ibid., 245.

103

Hervo noted that, ‘sous le drapeau francais, il s’est battu pour libérer l’Europe,’ but that as an

‘indigène’ received half the war pension of a ‘métropolitain.’164

Another mode by which the European credentials of the bidonvilles were re-asserted was

to insist on their spatial proximity to the centre of Paris. If Paris was reckoned to be the capital of

Europe, it followed that these settlements, often only a few kilometres from the Champs-Élysées

as it was constantly repeated, could not plausibly be subtracted from this Paris. As one Nanterre

resident expressed it succinctly, ‘mais après tout, le bidonville, c’est français; c’est à Paris qu’il

se trouve, c’est quelque chose d’ici.’165

Also, if the Paris authorities and Parisians deduced from the abject conditions of the

bidonvilles an essential lack of Europeanness in their residents, it was in fact the case that the

conditions of the Parisian bidonvilles were expressly felt by the inhabitants to be an injustice and

they were offended by notions that they were charity cases.166

Residents repeatedly objected that

such living conditions could still exist in the twentieth century.167

French authorities might have

continually emphasised the need to instil modern European values into North African migrants,

but it was in terms of their expectations of modern civilisation that the bidonville residents

indicted the French authorities and their lack of dynamism in facilitating decent accommodation.

Furthermore, the contradictoriness of the conflation of Europeanness and universalism was

highlighted when residents insisted on the equality of human beings as a rationale for the

provision of decent housing. As a former resident of the La Folie settlement in Nanterre put it to

Sayad: ‘habiter, c’est être parmi des humains, c’est vivre avec eux, c’est vivre entre eux; c’est

164

Hervo, Chroniques du bidonville, 104. 165

Ibid., 50. 166

Daniel Gordon, ‘“A Nanterre, ça bouge”: immigrés et gauchistes en banlieue, 1968 à 1971’, Historiens et

Géographes 385 (2004), 77, 84. 167

See Nadji, ‘“Je sors de l’enfer des bidonvilles, voilà ce que c’est”,’; Sayad & Dupuy, Un Nanterre algérien, 42.

Likewise, in his memoir of bidonville life, Brahim Benaïcha recalls the incorrect assumption of French people that

the bidonvilles residents refused to countenance progress. See Brahim Benaïcha, Vivre au paradis: d’une oasis à un

bidonville (Paris: Desdée de Brouwer, 1992), 39.

104

vivre en hommes, vivre humainement, dans les conditions normales des hommes, c’est vivre au

milieu d’eux, de la même manière qu’eux, donc dans les mêmes logements qu’eux.’168

One

thinks here of Rancière’s definition of politics as the ‘part of no part’ standing in as the universal

to claim equality within the polity.

Similarly, one core premise of Hervo’s work in the bidonvilles was to insist on the

equality of the residents, to refuse the segregation of its residents along with their habitat.

Accordingly, a letter from her and her colleague Brigitte Gall insisted that ‘en fait, il semble bien

que ces habitants des bidonvilles désirent – à quelques exceptions près – ce n’est pas une

aumône… C’est tout simplement le droit de vivre comme les autres.’169

In an entry in her

chronicle for October 1961, in what can also be seen as an invocation of a multidirectional

Europe, Hervo rhetorically leveraged the spatial integrity of the bidonvilles to Paris so as to

refuse this colonial objectivation of spatial segregation and inequality of material wealth and

recognition: ‘Paris. Sur le trottoir, une foule de passants, le pas pressé, longe de vitrines aux

brillantes enseignes lumineuses, exposant, bien présentés, des objets de luxe. Dans les faubourgs

de la Ville Lumière, je pense au bidonville, enclave du Tiers-Monde où la guerre sévit. D’un côté

les nantis, la joie. De l’autre, dénuement, mort, tortures. Quinze ans après la Second Guerre

Mondiale…’170

These various examples of a refusal of separation, the counter-factual insistence

that they were no less a part of the city and thus no less European a space, offered an interruptive

counter-understanding of how one thought about Paris.

The extent of the refusal of the disjuncture of the bidonvilles and their rhetorical

disconnection from the city though significant and under-estimated, should not be overstated

168

Sayad & Dupuy, Un Nanterre algérien, 41. 169

Letter from Monique Hervo & Brigitte Gall. 1 February, 1963. No addressee. FMH. ARC 3019 -2. 2. Dossier

général thématique. 170

Hervo, Chroniques du bidonville, 218.

105

however. There was a sense in which that segregation was appreciated by bidonville residents

themselves, at least before 1962. As MacMaster notes, the radical segregation of the shantytowns

often provided a sense of protection against a hostile and dangerous outside world. Moreover, the

general feeling of solidarity and community cohesion was strengthened during the Algerian war

and so it was an ideal terrain for the spread of Algerian nationalism.171

Counter-intuitively though, even when the segregation of the shantytowns was embraced

or accepted, there were still ways that they could be said to have been Europeanising spaces.

This is most interesting in the case of the criteria of the far right who invoked the bidonvilles,

especially in Nanterre, as a quintessential symbol of the menace of immigration and the

degeneracy of non-European peoples. Yet the remarkably autarchic internal economy of the

settlements, based on logic other than accumulation and emphasising solidarity, ironically

resembled to a great extent the kind of non-capitalist and socially cohesive market economy that

the far right held up as a template for Europe.172

Furthermore, on reflection on her bidonville co-residents, Hervo noted that, ‘nous,

Occidentaux, nous ne pouvons pas mesurer l’ampleur de ce cette solidarité tant elle est ancrée

dans le cœur des Arabes. L’étranger qu’on reçoit est considéré comme “l’hôte de Dieu.”’173

If on

one hand this set the shantytown residents, and North African immigrants generally, apart from

European Parisians, on the other they embodied what were esteemed to be the most precious

characteristics of Europeans – what the Orientalist Louis Massignon considered to have been so

valuable and so tragically lost from Europe – ‘le patrimoine abrahamique, la parole donnée, le

171

MacMaster, ‘Shantytown Republics’, 76-77. 172

See for example ‘La capitale des bidonvilles’, Cahiers universitaires 22 (February-March, 1965), 22-23. This

was the journal of the far right student group the FEN. Issues are available EN. 1, dossier 3. On the economy of the

bidonvilles see ‘Entretien avec des syndicalistes algériens’, Vérité Liberté: cahiers d’information sur la guerre

d’Algérie (September, 1960); & J.P. Imhof, ‘Le “bidonville” du Petit Nanterre,’ Cahiers Nord-Africains 89 (May,

1962). 173

Hervo, Chroniques du bidonville, 106.

106

droit d’asile.’174

In these ways, the homes of North Africans in Paris in this period can be thought

of as Europeanising spaces, and indeed anticipated Balibar’s point that the sociability of

immigrants of non-European origin in fact often overrides their lack of regional affiliation to

appear as ‘quintessential Europeans.’175

Conclusion

Just as there were many Europes, there were various kinds of Paris, each of which was

impacted by those various invocations of Europe, many of which were underscored by a putative

equivalence between modernisation and Europeanisation. The Parisian home, both in the sense

of material shelter and civic belonging and affective security, was impacted by the way the city’s

development was underscored by and interpreted in the light of diverse notions of Europe: a

shared European vision of recovery that derived from the experience of its cities being destroyed

in the Second World War; Paris as sanitised and zoned European capital; the Europe of the Cold

War; the Europe of tourism; the quickly reconfigured understandings of Europe and

Europeanness prompted by French decolonisation; the ethnicisation of Algierian immigrants and

its implications for housing policy; the linking of urban space and discourse of Europe; and

counter-inferences that if this Paris was a capital of Europe, those who were excluded from it or

devalued within it were in fact no less a part of it.

The right to a home in the city relied to a significant extent on criteria of Europeanness.

These criteria were far from coherent and consistent, however. Europeanness might be invoked

174

Jacques Berque & Louis Massignon, ‘Dialogue sur “Les Arabes ”’, Esprit 28/288 (October, 1960), 1519. 175

Étienne Balibar, ‘Is European Citizenship Possible?’, Public Culture 8/2 (Winter, 1996), 362.

107

merely in an underlying disdain for the city’s working classes. Or it might entail years for

Algerian and other migrants in transit centres where they were to be Europeanised in their

comportment and outlook, notably including the curtailment of radical politics. Furthermore,

discourse about Europeanness reverted between two registers of a clear binary opposition of

European and non-European, and a graded scale on which Europeanness gradually faded away.

Sometimes both were appealed to at once. This incoherence was compounded by the lack of a

clear view about what Europeanisation of immigrants entailed. Sometimes it seemed to convey

the making European of the non-European, whereas at other times it was implied this was

implausible, and so Europeanisation instead signified the extension of European control over the

non-European. A crucial point is that this incoherence was a symptom of this pivotal point in

post-war French and European history – decolonisation. Indeed, a perennial dilemma of

imperialism was brought home to the metropole, namely, the dual impulse of exclusion and

inclusion – the striving for a universalist polity on the one hand, and on the other a means to

refuse the extension of full equality which that universalism promised. Hence the universalist

aspirations of French Republican housing policy were blatantly self-thwarting in that they

ethnicised and segregated populations that they strove thereby to integrate; while conversely the

appeal to Europeanness facilitated the converse and simultaneous impulse to deny the rights and

provision that the French state’s universalism promised.